Who Really Won?

By Romesh Ratnesar

When the end of the most lopsided 78-day war in history finally came, the champagne was for the losers. In Belgrade last Wednesday night, thousands of young Serbs unburdened themselves in the city's Republic Square, dangling out the windows of their cars, blaring the horns and chanting "Serbia! Serbia!" They lit red magnesium flares and launched fireworks into the night sky. "I feel great," said Olivera Todorovic, 22. "It's a wonderful feeling to live again in peace."

Elsewhere the celebrations were fleeting. Bill Clinton openly declared "victory" in a nationally televised address Thursday night, followed by a triumphal tour Friday of Whiteman Air Force Base, home to the lethal B-2 bombers that emerged as the technological heroes of the war. But that evening, faces at the White House turned ashen. Commanders of Russian troops in Bosnia, evidently worried about the fate of Kosovar Serbs, had rumbled into Pristina, Kosovo's capital, despite an earlier understanding that they would not enter until agreement had been reached with NATO on command of the peacekeepers. On Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov apologized and said the troops would withdraw, but as the day wore on, they stayed put, effectively in charge of the airport.

The 200 Russian troops were no threat to the allied forces, but their bizarre deployment set off worries about whether Russian President Boris Yeltsin was in control of his own military, or whether he had sanctioned the early troop movement as a concession to hard-line generals dismayed by Russia's lack of influence in Kosovo. Publicly, however, U.S. officials tried to put the best spin on the situation. "We would like them to participate [in the peacekeeping mission]," said Defense Secretary William Cohen. "Whether they arrive a few hours earlier or later really is not a significant factor."

From the start of the conflict, the U.S. and its allies knew that after the bombing stopped, they would assume the responsibility for keeping peace in Kosovo; that it would require thousands of troops on the ground to prevent flare-ups between stray armed Serbian civilians and the Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.); and that the mission would be long and costly. But all that was supposed to get going after a few days of air strikes--not after three months, during which the Serbs reduced Kosovo to a wasteland and turned more than 800,000 Kosovars into refugees. The Administration's price tag for patrolling and rehabilitating Kosovo will run into billions of dollars. But given that there are 400,000 displaced persons within Kosovo, things may be even worse. "We are all waiting with some trepidation," said U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, "about what happens when we actually get into Kosovo."

The wait won't be long. Serbian troops jammed the roads leading out of Kosovo late last week, waving their arms and firing guns out of armored vehicles. While the Russians were first into Pristina, the Serbian departure was quickly followed by the arrival of the British and the French, who came early Saturday to begin the work of establishing a NATO foothold. In the Kosovar village of Urosevac, ethnic Albanians showered NATO forces with flowers. One man said it was the first time in 10 weeks that he had emerged from his basement hiding place. The U.S. has pledged a contingent of 7,000 soldiers to the Kosovo Force (KFOR); the soldiers and marines will man the southeastern corner of the province. European officials believe that Kosovo may have the world's highest concentration of buried mines. The first wave of KFOR troops will have to defuse them before the refugees can drive their tractors and cars back in.

Though the Serbs have promised to be out of Kosovo in 11 days, allied officials say it could take much longer. Some are worried that bands of departing Serbs will desert their military units and haul off after the returning Albanians. "It is not safe yet [for them] to go back in," said Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton. It is still unclear how the refugees will react to the cease-fire. Many will have to be persuaded to go home. Says Sanha Rusihti, an ethnic Albanian living in a camp in Macedonia: "I'm scared of going in, even if NATO soldiers escort me by the hand." But others are eager to return. Says Shkurte Gashi, 42, a refugee from western Kosovo: "I want to go back as soon as possible because I have nine members of my family there, and I want to find out what happened to them."

Relief officials say Kosovars in the refugee camps will probably dispatch "pioneer groups" to survey the damage wrought by the war. It is not an encouraging picture. At least half the houses in Kosovo have been razed. There are no viable livestock or crops. Simply feeding the internally displaced Kosovars will require shipments of 1,000 tons of food daily. Because Serbian authorities destroyed most of the ethnic Albanians' personal records, KFOR and the U.N.'s civilian administrators will face the nightmarish task of sorting out those who have legal claims to land and property. The U.S. hopes to organize and oversee committees of local Kosovars to help U.N. officials coordinate the rebuilding of infrastructure, schools and clinics. But international-aid workers and peacekeepers will have to compete with the K.L.A., which will want to reassert control over villages as the Serbs pull out.

It is a contest the peacekeepers have little chance of winning. Many trauma-racked refugees, still wary of Serbian aggression, are sure to look to the K.L.A. for protection. The peace pact calls for the "demilitarization" of the K.L.A.--but not for its disarming. So the rebels will keep their small arms, the tools of choice for guerrilla fighters. Meanwhile, the U.N. will shoulder the heavy burden of setting up a Kosovar police force. Its first challenge will be to stamp out the K.L.A.'s revolutionary zeal. Albright labored to assure the 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo that the K.L.A. had pledged not to do them harm, but it was apparent that most Serbs did not believe her. As Serbian military buses and tanks trundled out, their convoys were punctuated by cars packed with nervous civilians.

The dwindling of the Serbian presence in Kosovo will add to the ethnic-Albanian clamor for independence. The Rambouillet agreement that Milosevic rejected in March specifically provided for a referendum on Kosovar independence. The deal signed last week does not.

The U.S. military's stay in Kosovo won't be short. In Bosnia, American troops have had some success enforcing the peace. They have separated warring Muslims and Serbs and stemmed any outbreaks of violence. But they have failed to return scores of refugees to their former homes. And while the number of U.S. troops there has dropped from 20,000 to 6,000 since 1995, the predicted length of their deployment has ballooned from 12 months to indefinite. Pentagon officials are girding themselves for more of the same in Kosovo. "We're here for the long haul," says an Army planner. "Like decades."

But that may be O.K., at least in some rooms of the Pentagon, where Iraq and now Kosovo are seen as victories. In fact, some American military planners believe that limited, troubleshooting missions like the one waged over Kosovo are a model for future engagements. The U.S. may not be able to wipe trouble off the map, the thinking goes, but it can contain it, as it has done in Iraq and now Serbia. Yet the tendency of the U.S. to fight low-intensity wars that stop short of winning unconditional surrender--and that leave tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Milosevic in power--has inspired public doubts. The peace deal had barely been inked last week when 155 members of Congress voted for a measure that would cut off funding for the Kosovo mission after Sept. 30. The bill was shelved only after Clinton sent a letter to the Hill promising to seek congressional approval for a peacekeeping force.

The White House pressed ahead with the effort to chalk this up in the win column for the U.S. "Do you think," grumbled White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, "that on the day the Gulf War ended, [CNN] had a segment titled 'At What Price Peace?'" Maybe not. But victory seems too simple a word for this complex and tragic region. As they envisioned returning to their ruined homes and to the arduous process of rebuilding their lives, few Kosovars felt that they had tasted real victory over the Serbs. At least not yet. Bekim Sabedini, a 27-year-old farmer from eastern Kosovo, explained his intentions toward his Serbian neighbors: "At best, I will not speak to them. At better, I will do what they did to me."

--Reported by Douglas Waller with Albright, Jay Branegan and Mark Thompson/ Washington, Anthee Carassava/Blace, Gillian Sandford/Pristina and William Dowell/U.N.

With reporting by Douglas Waller with Albright, Jay Branegan and Mark Thompson/ Washington, Anthee Carassava/Blace, Gillian Sandford/Pristina and William Dowell/U.N.